Citizen Solution: How You Can Make A Difference

3. Breaking the Silence

3Breaking the Silence A group that organized to restore balance in families’ hectic lives in some Twin Cities’ suburbs also broke the silence on hidden discontents, such as family over-scheduling and the erosion of community life. The group’s success has lessons for the surfacing of hidden but widespread cultural discontents. The group raises a question central to the nation’s future: how do we educate well-rounded children who are as concerned about the common good as they are about personal success? T  ,  ,   threaten civic life. The Minnesota Community Project, created by former vice president Walter Mondale at the Humphrey Institute, noted disturbing trends such as “divisions into increasingly irreconcilable [political] camps . . . deep skepticism about public institutions, and strong disagreements on their role,” as well as a sense of declining community as people no longer know their neighbors, suburban fears of increasing immigration, and worry about the state of public schools.1 Unease with values touted by the mass culture is often hard for people to talk about. From new immigrants to suburban parents, from inner-city teachers to faculty and students in colleges, people experience “problems that have no name.” C H A P T E R T I T L E • 47 At the Center for Democracy and Citizenship () we first discovered such hidden discontents in , when the Kellogg Foundation asked us to investigate the possibilities for renewing the land-grant public service mission of the University of Minnesota. Edwin Fogelman, chair of the political science department, and I interviewed people who were widely respected in different departments and colleges, seen to embody the ethos or culture of their disciplines and the university, and knowledgeable about its history and operations. Far more than we expected , the interviews uncovered an often painful loss of public purpose . People were alarmed about turf wars, hypercompetitive norms, and the “star system.” Faculty members voiced unrealized desires that public engagement be a component of professional work. “Our whole department feels too cloistered,” said one department chair, expressing a hope to engage more deeply the urban scene and the public world. Yet across academic disciplines, people said also that they felt increasingly detached even from their departments. “I talk far more to the fifty people in my sub-discipline on the Internet than I do to the people on my hall,” said one. And faculty—including many who were extremely successful individually—expressed a deep sense of collective powerlessness to do much about these trends.2 There was also pervasive silence. Faculty members said that they avoided mention of their public interests—what had led most of them into academia in the first place—for fear that it might jeopardize their reputations for “rigorous scholarship.” They also described the erosion of a sense of departmental community, weakening of the apprenticeship model of relationships with graduate students, and a loss of connection to the local Twin Cities. In subsequent visits to many other campuses in the state and elsewhere, I have found such sentiments to be widespread. Against this background, we joined with partners to solicit views from Minnesotans about what civic and community values are important to them, what people perceive as threats to community, and what 48 • T H E C I T I Z E N S O L U T I O N can be done to address the problems and to strengthen our community life. Several thousand Minnesotans participated in house meetings, small group sessions usually held in a home or similar informal setting, and forums in  and . Many participants mentioned issues regularly discussed in conventional politics—schools, abortion, taxes, race relations, growing income divides, the war in Iraq. But probing for civic values and threats to them also revealed other subjects not so often discussed. People expressed a good deal of anxiety, even fear, that Minnesota’s civic culture is endangered. Many voiced the view that a sense of community is eroding . “People in cars don’t make eye contact any more in my neighborhood ,” said one suburban doctor. “I drive into my carport and shut the door, and never talk to my neighbors. It’s a culture of me, me, me.” Students commonly worried about the erosion of relationships. “We’ve lost face-to-face human contact. Everyone walks around in their own little iPod world, wired up but tuned out,” said Amy Jo Pierce, a student leader at the University of Minnesota...